Tag: best of

In the 70s music critics had an edge on the fans – if Richard Meltzer is to be believed, they got free records, invites to parties studded with stars, drugs and other party favours. In 2017 it is becoming increasingly common to not get sent the biggest new releases at all, never mind before they come out. (I note the dry irony in Taylor Swift’s album cover art appropriating newspaper logo fonts – several critics I know still haven’t received the promo.) In the mid 2000s I used to keep stacks of CDs in my desk, ordered by release date. When you opened the drawer, they stared back at you – imploringly, for less known artists, and reproachfully for the big names. Now digital promos from the majorspo arrive in dribs and drabs, sometimes expiring before you have a chance to hit ‘Play’ on track one. You can hear practically everything on demand via streaming, which is not new, but for me the landscape has finally flattened into a featureless horizon – your access is limited only by your time management. Everything is available, and everything is passing you by.

The effect on my listening is two-fold: I focus on genres I know I like, because there’s no force pushing me to engage with pop – it isn’t playing in the bars I go to, it doesn’t cross my twitter feed, I never hear commercial radio. (Pour one out for the major label marketers.) But I also feel perpetually behind, listening to records only once or twice because there’s an endless supply of new records being pushed by my genre outlets of choice (media content farms and ever-scrolling social feeds) and the FOMO is real, y’all.

So aside from the emergence of two new sounds, ‘weightless’ beat-deprived grime and dusty electro-ish drum machine industrial funk I’m dubbing CabVoltCore – neither of which I’ve seen trend pieces about so I’ve just guessed they exist – my listening this year roamed in a vast but fenced-in auditory landscape. And really, aside from the FOMO, it’s all good. I don’t miss what I don’t know exists (or don’t put at the top of a playlist). For what I didn’t miss, read on.

1. Jlin - Black Origami (Planet Mu)

I really liked Jlin's debut, but I was a little suspicious of it being named The Wire's disc of the year - arriving amid the explosion of footwork at the time it seemed more like they wanted to celebrate the idea of experimenting with its rhythms than the actual result. Now I think they were just more perceptive than me - Black Origami is not conceptually that different from 2015's Dark Energy but it hit me like a bolt of lightning, maybe not coincidentally because the micro-bubble in radically strange footwork albums seems to have burst. With the field now largely to herself, Jlin's vision comes across as truly her own - a haunted landscape of reptilian hihats and shakers snapping menacingly over sand-blasted vocal snippets. If David Lynch remade Dune this would be the perfect soundtrack, all alien tones and martial snares conjuring a frightening yet fascinatingly unique planet ruled by huge worms. I don't know what worms sound like but they're in here somewhere, I'm sure of it.

In this post: an introduction, reviews of the top 10 albums of the year, a complete top 50 list, and a streaming playlist with a track from every top 50 album save for those not on Spotify. See you in 2017!

There were no seismic shifts in the pop landscape in 2016, nor in 2015, nor in 2014, nor in recent memory. The last time I remember feeling a legit sense of the earth moving under my feet (um, ears?) was when in 2006-2007 the Neptunes and Timbaland ceded ground to Kanye West’s now-dated chipmunked vocal samples, The White Stripes (and before them, The Strokes) firmly rewrote the pop-rock template and the Dixie Chicks told the world they weren’t ready to make nice. All the change since then has felt incremental, which may be a function of my age, but aside from maybe Drake and 40, who has rewritten the playbook — anyone’s playbook? Maybe it doesn’t work like that anymore. Technological change can generally be seen only in the rear-view mirror, but I can’t help thinking it’s changing the way the music evolves. Weep for the future historians who have to find a through-line in the evolution of music in the teens.

If that’s the way things are, or will be, then 2016 was the year I stopped worrying and learned to love the absence of a bomb. None of the albums on my top 10 list feel like any kind of quantum leap forward, but they are all masterful and constantly stimulating, even surprising, on the tenth or even fiftieth listen. It’s pretty shocking to me that a straight-up gangsta rap record like Still Brazy or an instrumental-rock spazzout like Return To Sky would end up atop my list, to the point that I often wonder whether I’ve started privileging the familiar over the unexpected as a kind of defensive mechanism, against the shell-shock of the new. But the flipside of that is my disdain for the records proclaimed as epochal (Arcade Fire *durrr*, Taylor Swift *yawn*) has made me more enthusiastic about records that feature maturing talents, like Blonde, and that showcase mature artists operating at their peak, like Anguis Oleum and A Moon Shaped Pool. It’s exciting to be around when the music world is being turned upside down, but it’s no consolation prize to bear witness to a crop of artists who be doin it and doin it and doin it well.

1. Frank Ocean - Blonde (Boys Don't Cry)

Team Frank Ocean was already a heaving bandwagon when Blonde dropped, though to these ears the hype was premature when Channel Orange was the only evidence on offer. Whatever, I probably wouldn't have thought Prince was a genius on the basis of his first album, and yet, and yet. Blonde is plenty full of genius-signaling greatness, in flashes of wry lyrical humor ("did you call me from a seance? You from my past life") and epic ballads like "White Ferrari" that just scream This Is Everything You Never Dared Hope He Could Become. There's something in Ocean's ability to leave a line hanging in the synth-soaked, sometimes guitar-wrist-flick-punctuated air. He owns the space between words, shapes it invisibly with the last line and the next one. Even the funkier moments like "Pink + White" are expertly paced hops from one melodic cloud to the next, with his signature move of brightening the harmony in mid-lyric. More than any other impulse he seems to have, Frank Ocean just loves to yank the listener from nostalgic, sometimes idyllic images drenched in romance to mundane, pungent detail about drugs or, often, driving. "We're alone, making sweet love, taking time / but god strikes us!" To me, the centerpiece of the album is "Solo" for the simple reason that it works on a granular detail level -- capturing a moment of pure bliss from an acid trip on a dance floor -- but it also works its way gradually through a heartbreak that left him alone, exposed without a lover and without the rhythm section whose absence leaves a joy-shaped hole in the track. Absence and space are the most expressive parts of the album, and knowing how to play them is irrefutable proof that Frank Ocean has ascended to a higher plane. Though if he really were some kind of god, he'd be the kind that likes to day-trip back to earth, maybe as a swan, just to mess with some poor human for a few hours before returning skyward.

WHERE IS T-SWIFT?

Ok, I admit it, I didn’t listen to it. Nor did I get through albums by Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Jessie J, Keyshia Cole, Calvin Harris, et al and sundry. I also didn’t hear all of Ariel Pink, Foxygen, Swans, TV on the Radio, Leonard Cohen, Julian Casablancas and too many others to count. Don’t even talk to me about jazz or country. (I wouldn’t have much of interest to say.) So WTF *did* I listen to? I’m not even sure how to describe it. Dave-core? Morris-dance? …maybe it’s better if I don’t.

This is the odd post-poptimist desert I feel like I’ve been sent to, via my escape pod hurtling from the full time music-crit grind. The barriers have all fallen – like a lot of right-thinking people, I’m perfectly happy to flip flop from Nicki Minaj to Neil Young to Young Thug in the space of an hour, but what happens when you don’t have time to devote to what might properly be called truly Catholic tastes? Does my embracing of a specialty – electronic music, not even really including the hip-hop that used to be part of my professional bag – mean I’ve re-embraced some of the biases I spent the early 2000s working to shed, like an earnest young Chinese party bureaucrat devouring Marx and Mao, and then giving it up in favour of Day Trading For Dummies?

It’s not a question of openness, I’ve realized, but a question of how you apportion your listening time. For better or for worse, I shoved the stuff that seemed like a long shot into a hard drive folder marked ‘Later’ and threw on another platter of grime, and this is the list that came out.. There was certainly no kind of shortage of amazing electronics to digest; the volume of almost-worthy discs attests to that. (Sorry Tre Mission, SBTRKT, DMX Krew, Shi Wisdom, Mark McGuire, Run The Jewels, Pop Ambient 2015, I could go on.) The LPs that did make the cut seemed not quite dancefloor friendly, except in an abstract sense. Bits and pieces of LV and Joshua Idehen, Caribou, Distal et al slipped into my mixes with scant friction. But the inventiveness I loved often didn’t fit in the space between floor-filling singles, not that I mind. Still, this is a list borne of someone who experienced dance music in 2014 mostly in a bedroom or between headphones. Simon Reynolds’ inveighing against IDM-like anti-dancefloorism aside, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

The startling truth is that being kind of lazy, in terms of challenging your sense of what you like, can still be an astonishingly rich listening experience. There was enough originality and delight in my year in albums to make the absence of all that pop and hip-hop I missed feel about as painful as the knowledge that I didn’t eat nearly enough artisanal cheese in the last twelve months – not quite the sting of regret as much as the vague acknowledgement that I may have missed something good, possibly, but it’s not keeping me up at night.

If I had one thing I would ask of dance music in 2015, it would be for the most hypnotic, challenging, arresting, electrifying albums to be a little more melodic. I love the discs I chose, but as a whole I felt like my diet was a smidge on the grey side. Producers like Mumdance and Logos, Peverelist, Objekt and others put out single after single of holy-shit-guys-listen-to-this-ism, but when I put them all in a mix, I ended up taking a bunch out and replacing them with some chooons to break up the monotony. And the grab-bag of albums felt roughly the same, though I didn’t curate this list in a similar way. You can’t turn down a slamming, mesmerizing beat like the ones all over the Next Life comp or the Clap! Clap! record, melody or no. Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.

You better stop, children what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
No but like, seriously, what the fuck was that? It was hella loud, yo
– Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth”

There have been a lot of records this year in the burgeoning BANG! BOOM! CRASH! subgenre, where the samples and/or drums are so loud they feel like they’re jumping out of your speaker and hitting you in the face, even at low volume. But the best of them remain undeniably musical, and even catchy. Evian Christ and Bok Bok are tops in this department, through different approaches; the American upstart is relentlessly melodic even with his noisiest bits (a skill he shares with Skrillex, of all people) while the Brit turns even the rawest repetitions into R&B, whether it’s with 80s quiet storm synths or the very Aaliyah-like vocal stylings of Kelela.

Looking down the list, melody is the thing, however subtle. It’s there in Martyn and Four Tet’s twinkling kalimba samples, Toronto’s Jex Opolis’ Zither EP (especially “On The Cliffs” with its stabs of vocal “aaaahs” and gently burbling drums), DMX Krew’s oddly compelling lounge-pop and even H-SIK’s amped-up breakbeat science. I used to think a hummable tune was optional, even quaint, but maybe the years of minimal tech – and the waning of the prog house sound in favour of who knows what in EDM-land – have made it more palatable, if not outright necessary.

You’ve got your grime-oriented and just plain weird producers in there, of course – Mumdance coming with a couple of collaborations (with Logos and Pinch respectively) that make it sound like there’s a vacuum cleaner and/or a rogue mobile phone behind the boards, as well as Phon.o, Lakker and L-Vis 1990 all delivering sides that are more not-there than there. But the tunes predominate, however simple — from Vitalic’s uncharacteristically pop-oriented take on Paul Kalkbrenner’s “Altes Kamuffel” to the chugging grooves from Melchior Productions Ltd., Todd Terje and KHLHI (a.k.a. Four Tet).

While wearing my daytime business-editor hat, I noticed that the central bank in the U.S. is starting to wean the global economy off the stimulus teat thatâ€™s been keeping us alive since the crisis. Nobody seemed much surprised, which is what these money mandarins are ostensibly paid for â€“ to see whatâ€™s coming around the curve.

Music critics are, by definition, no good at seeing the future; weâ€™re lucky if weâ€™re up to speed onÂ the present, at least in terms of whoâ€™s making good music now â€“ whether they seize the zeitgeist shouldnâ€™t really be our issue, if weâ€™re doing our jobs. Thatâ€™s what weâ€™re paid for (or not, as the case may increasingly be).

I donâ€™t know whatâ€™s coming around the curve in music, but I do know that the last few years of my own taste has been defined in terms of opposition to things I donâ€™t like. Queens Of The Stone Age and Nine Inch Nails are heavy, but not screaming or grunting unintelligibly, or incorporating EDM farts and grunts in the hopes of making someoneâ€™s E-themed Spotify playlist. (Korn should have called their album â€˜Pop a molly, Grandadâ€™s sweatin.â€™) A$AP Rocky, Pusha T and Jay-Z were doubling down on wordplay while Kanye was turning into Patrick Bateman, to the bewilderment of even his most ardent fans. Justin Timberlake and AlunaGeorge were looking back to the 70s and the 90s respectively (AG’sÂ â€œThis Is How We Do Itâ€ cover was a dead giveaway, not that we needed one), trying to find a love connection when The Weeknd and Drake were driving the R&B bus too fast, coked out of their skulls and threatening to crash the thing because whatâ€™s the point of life, really? Even My Bloody Valentine were reclaiming psychedelia for rock bands with guitars, while their bastard progeny were doing their iciest thousand mile stare from behind banks of keyboards and drum machines.

When the financial crisis ended, politics around the world went through convulsions â€“ a wave of throw-the-bums-out sentiment found everyone from the Tea Party to Rob Ford seizing the reins, as though the entire world was seized by a fit of Howard Beale-esque pique. In terms of aesthetics, I have gone through a similar upheaval; I woke up one day and realized I didnâ€™t like most of the contemporary hip-hop out there, but that I wasnâ€™t ready to stop looking for reasons to believe â€“ history and common sense tells us that if you think everything is crap, the problem is you. Thatâ€™s how I ended up writing about the things this blog focuses on; the energy behind hip-hop seemed to have migrated elsewhere., and I wanted to find it.

But the old favourites have been creeping back in. Number one on this list is Queens Of The Stone Age, a band that is so far outside the remit of this blog that I might as well have turned it into RollingStone.com. Ditto Camera Obscura, a band whose comfort-food nature Iâ€™ve been so uncomfortable with that Iâ€™ve never dared put their albums as high on my year-end list as I should, if I was being honest with myself. Am I turning back into the 17-year-old who listened to Nirvana and Soundgarden almost exclusively? Should I attempt to grow a mullet? Have the last 15 years of exploration been a waste of time, money and effort that I could have been using to learn Spanish or grow my own sugar beets?

Actually, the Jay-Z albumâ€™s high placement is the perfect distillation of the question: Did I put it there not because Jay-Zâ€™s album was more adventurous, more vibrant and alive than, say, Drakeâ€™s, but because I already know that I like what Jay-Zâ€™s music generally sounds like? I canâ€™t answer that question â€“ Iâ€™m biased. But the signs point to yes, considering that I didnâ€™t even listen to Drakeâ€™s album for several months after it came out. I really, really didnâ€™t want to, and Drake is arguably someone who is still figuring out what heâ€™s about in a more profound and searching way than Jay-Z.

On the other hand, Iâ€™m not sure I buy that. Drake is trying to figure out why heâ€™s such a jerk to girls, while only understanding in the most abstract sense that he is, in fact, being a jerk to them â€“ his momma raised him well enough to recognize bad behaviour, but he doesnâ€™t feel much in the way of empathy for the people heâ€™s being bad to. Jay-Z, on the other hand, keeps his introspection hiding in plain sight. Listening to Magna Carta Holy Grail, you might think it was yet another victory lap, a cheery wave from the deck of a yacht. But itâ€™s no passing fancy that Jay compares himself repeatedly to Jean-Michel Basquiat, a street kid turned graffiti artist turned mainstream darling. A misfit given all the money and fame he could dream of, and who ultimately couldnâ€™t handle it. Jay can, but the undercurrent of fear and doubt is as easy to scan as the bravado on the surface.

Jay is just as self-obsessed, but heâ€™s much more well rounded than Drake, and at this stage of my life, I find it hard to identify with artists who are only just starting to discover themselves â€“ or in the case of Eminem, who probably never will know themselves in any real way. It canâ€™t be a coincidence how many of the artists on my list are rebounding, either from life-threatening injury (QOTSA) or self-imposed retirement (Jay, MBV, Nine Inch Nails, Fall Out Boy, Justin Timberlake, Mazzy Star).

Wading into the new music thatâ€™s lighting up Pitchfork or the Twittersphere feels a bit like interval training in fitness, where you alternate periods of high and low intensity: every time one of the hard bits is over, you think thereâ€™s no way you can do it again, but after not very long at all your fatigue melts away and you reluctantly jump back in. Scrolling down the list of whatâ€™s hot in various cultural cubbyholes â€“ Arcade Fire, Miley Cyrus, Disclosure â€“ the temptation to misanthropically toss it all out with the bathwater is immense, but I always amaze myself by finding something worthwhile that isnâ€™t just playing to my long-nurtured cultural biases. The all-surface-yet-utterly-fresh-and-compelling raps of A$AP Rocky, CFCFâ€™s salvaging of Tangerine Dream et al but leaving out the pomposity, Danny Brownâ€™s raggedy genius and DJ Rashadâ€™s economicalÂ sampledelia give me hope that pop music isnâ€™t just feeding endlessly off its own entrails â€“ or that I am.

Mileyâ€™s admittedly-pretty-rad lead single puts it best, despite the painful attempt at patois: â€œWe run things, things donâ€™t run we.â€ Â There are mixes to make and records to slag. I found 50 records to love (and I mean love, not just tolerate) this year alone for chrissakes! So Iâ€™ll keep throwing myself back into that octagon. When I canâ€™t find anything to like in the next trend (Selfie-core?), take away my Twitter handle. Right now, we canâ€™t stop.

A-void.ca’s Top 50 albums of 2013

Queens Of The Stone Age – â€¦like Clockwork (Matador)

**A$AP Rocky – Long Live A$AP (Columbia)

**Jay-Z – Magna Carta Holy Grail (Roc Nation/Universal)

Camera Obscura – Desire Lines (4AD)

*CFCF – Outside (Paper Bag)

**Jeremiah Jae and Oliver the 2nd – RawHyde (self-released)

*KEN Mode – Entrench (Season of Mist)

Syclops – A Blink Of A Eye (Running Back)

My Bloody Valentine – MBV (self released)

Deerhunter – Monomania (4AD)

Danny Brown – Old (Fools Gold)

Pusha T – My Name Is My Name (GOOD Music/Def Jam)

Omar Souleyman – Wenu Wenu (Ribbon Music)

**Justin Timberlake – 20/20 Experience (RCA/Sony)

DJ Rashad – Double Cup (Hyperdub)

**Bitchin Bajas – Krausened (Permanent)

Ducktails – The Flower Lane / Wish Hotel EP (Domino)

*Teenanger – Singles Don’t $ell (Telephone Explosion)

AlunaGeorge – Body Music (Island/Universal)

Ras G – Back On The Planet (Brainfeeder)

Pissed Jeans – Honeys (Sub Pop)

Nine Inch Nails – Hesitation Marks (Columbia/Sony)

Fall Out Boy – Save Rock and Roll (Def Jam/Universal)

Pop 1280 – Imps of Perversion (Sacred Bones)

**VA: Night Slugs Allstars Volume 2 (Night Slugs)

*Mathew Jonson – Her Blurry Pictures (Crosstown Rebels/K7)

Human Eye – 4: Into Unknown (In The Red)

Washed Out – Paracosm (Sub Pop)

*A Tribe Called Red – Nation II Nation (Tribal Rhythms)

Cave – Threace (Drag City)

Bassekou Koutate – Jama Ko (Cumbancha)

Earl Sweatshirt – Doris (Tan Cressida/Columbia)

Mazzy Star – Seasons Of Your Day (Rhymes Of An Hour)

*Rhye – Woman (Polydor)

*Kobo Town – Jumbie In The Jukebox (Cumbancha)

VA: Livity Sound (Livity Sound)

Phoenix – Bankrupt (Cherrytree/Universal)

Atoms For Peace – Amok (XL)

Gardland – Syndrome Syndrome (RVNG Intl)

Neon Neon – Praxis Makes Perfect (Lex)

Autechre – Exai (Warp)

Black Sabbath – 13 (Universal)

Ashley Monroe – Like A Rose (Warner)

Jonas Reinhardt – Mask Of The Maker (Not Not Fun)

*Illangelo – History of Man (Bromance)

**The-Dream – IV Play (Def Jam/Universal)

Machinedrum – Vapor City (Ninja Tune)

Palma Violets – 180 (Rough Trade)

Zomby – With Love (4AD)

Cyclopean – Cyclopean EP (Spoon)

* Canadian
** From my first-half-year list

1-7 Â A joy to listen to all the way through
8-16 Â Miles above average, but with a tiny flaw – at worst, one not-amazing track
17-21 Â Very strong, but higher-ranking records have something intangible that these don’t
22-31 Â Memorable, if on a re-listen, slightly uneven
32-38 Â Either brilliant-yet-uneven, or consistently-great-but-not-brilliant
39-50 Â Records I flagged as best-of-year and worth going back to, but that I wasn’t quite as enthused about later on

The posts here have been thin lately because I’m trying to clear my gargantuan backlog of albums I put off listening to but should probably check out before the end of the year. However, now that I’ve been checking them out, I’ve discovered that most of them are fucking godawful.

So, when the music biz gives you lemons, you whine and complain about what the fuck are you going to do with these goddamn lemons. (And if that’s not your bag, go listen to my latestmixes you bunch of ingrates.) To wit: my take on albums that didn’t make the cut…

Britney SpearsBritney Jean

Is it weird that most of these songs sound like they could be about Jesus? The winner in that category has to be “Now That I Found You,” otherwise known as Brit Brit’s answer to “Cotton Eyed Joe” (“I can live my life / I believe in faith / I have found myself / I have lost the hate”). I wish I were kidding.

Neko CaseThe Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You

This is not a bad album, and this is not a worst-of list. Even if it’s not fully my thing, I can admit that there’s plenty to like here, from the way the music often pushes what you expect from the country/folk production into a wholly different emotional place. “Man” is brilliantly pointed, “I’m From Nowhere” meanders in an endearing way, etc. But there’s just nothing that can make up for something as melodramatic as “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” at least in my books. It was based on a true story. Oh, well alright then.

EminemThe Marshall Mathers LP2

Eminem can still technically rap. That doesn’t mean he can drop even one half-decent single anymore. Stop doing everything in a minor key! Stop trying to do concept songs! Stop ruining classic rock songs like Time of the Season! Stop making nu-metal songs like Survival Of The Fittest! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST STOP

Goodie MobAge Against The Machine

You are probably a bad person if you don’t think “Nexperience” is a song that Cee-Lo should have the opportunity to sing on the season finale of next year’s The Voice so that all of America has to pay attention (“I broke the rules with a pair of dancing shoes, committed blasphemy, even let you laugh at me… After all I’ve done, I’m still a niggerrrrrrrrrrr!!”). On the other hand, Cee-Lo’s deadly-sincere bubblegum ode to “my very first white girl” is the kind of awfulness I had previously only assumed could come from will.i.am.

ReconditeHinterland

Who says minimal techno is boring? Certainly not the producer behind Ghostly’s latest full-length. Repetitive? Sure. Dry? Assuredly. Somnolent? Why if the rest of the tracks are like the first one, I think I could listen to this sort of thing for hours upon hou-ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Miley CyrusBangerz

I was ready to give this a legit shot after “We Can’t Stop” started growing on me. Then I hit “4×4,” Miley’s stab at making a Florida Georgia Line “Cruise”-style country-rap hit, complete with Nelly cameo. “Drivin so fast, bout to piss on myself.” Screw the VMAs, this is precisely where Miley went off the rails. Honorable mention goes to the line: “I ain’t popped no molly, but you still got me sweatin’.” And incidentally, I’m glad that America’s youth are so comfortable with racial issues that an ex-child TV star slipping in and out of appallingly-unconvincing ebonics ranks some eight bazillion slots lower on the offensiveness-ranking-ladder than acting like a slut on television. U.S.A.!